


Who Will Love You? (Who Will Fight?)

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:26:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And there, pulsing red and bright under Zelena's long, thin fingers is a heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Will Love You? (Who Will Fight?)

They haven’t even had time to repair the traffic light – still on the ground, a mass of mangled metal and shattered faces pushed to the curb – when the Wicked Witch attacks again.

She’s found her stage again, found her petrified audience of townspeople, and it’s all beginning to become too familiar by the time she goes toe to toe with Emma.

Emma’s blood is moving through her veins at such a rate that her entire body is thrumming insane energy and fear, and she turns to her right to seek out his eyes, to convey a silent plan, a nonverbal pact that whatever happens, the goal is to keep the town, to keep  _Henry_  safe, but her gaze never connects. There is asphalt and air and  _nothing_  and  _where the_ hell _is he._

It’s such a gut reaction at this point, a knee jerk to expect him to be her shadow, that when he is suddenly missing, she feels stripped of her armor – exposed and vulnerable and unprepared.

“Looking for something?” Zelena’s voice rends an awful hole in the night air, and when Emma looks at her, her smile is rancid and festering and  _evil_. 

There, pulsing red and bright under her long, thin fingers is a heart. 

And she knows,  _knows_ with a certainty that _sears white_ , whose heart it is and she feels her stomach give an awful lurch.

“Zelena,” it’s a warning, a curse, a prayer – a million things at once, but even to her own ears it is the pleading of a terrified little girl.

“Or is this,” she snaps her thumb and middle finger and emerald smoke whirls in a cyclone in front of her feet, “more to your taste?”

He’s on his knees in unwilling supplication – all leather and tousled hair and –

“ _Hook_  –” a foot forward and he recoils in pain – lips twisted, teeth bared in unbearable _agony._

“Uh, uh, uh,” Zelena tuts. “I think we both know that’s not how this works,  _Savior_.”

His shoulders are hunched and she thinks about how she told him she was going back to New York with Henry; she pulls apart ‘ _one time thing’_ and she regrets so many moments and –

“What do you want?”

Zelena laughs, clenches her fingers tighter, and Hook’s heart  _gives._ He moans and Emma’s heart  _burns._

“Oh, Emma,” she purrs like velvet, acidic and caustic to the touch. “It’s quite simple.  _Your_  heart for  _his_.”

“Emma, no!” He manages to howl before Zelena’s nails bite into his ventricles and he can’t make any sounds save for low, angry wheezes.

And it occurs to her for the first time since she met him, since she trusted her life – trusted her _son’s_ life – to him on the beanstalk, in Neverland (and beyond), that he could die. That one second he could be there, and the next, he might not. That just like Neal, he could be cold and still and  _gone_.

She is trembling as her mouth moves around her set jaw – jutted forward and shaking. “Hook has  _nothing_  to do with this – with  _me_  or  _Regina_  or the  _curse_ ,” she licks her lips, traces his form curled tightly as he’s eaten from within. “This is  _our_  fight –  _not_ his.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,  _dearie_.” The witch cackles, gives the heart an experimental squeeze, and Emma watches horrified as Hook drops to his back, hand clawing at his chest – hook missing (stripped from him). “He has  _everything_  to do with you.”

“No _,_ ” she’s blinking to clear her eyes, when it begins; a churning where her spine starts, something sending sparks to her panting lungs and throbbing heart. “Let. Him. Go.”

“Oh,” Zelena pouts, kicks Hook in his side with a pointed boot, “I don’t think so – not when I’ve got your heart.”

“Emma, no,” he bites out around laden, painful breaths. His eyes are as blue as ever when she meets them, but they are  _empty_  – there is a brittleness about them, hollow like bones and just as hard. And she  _needs him back._

Her veins – which until that point have been humming discordantly beneath her skin – begin to  _scream,_ begin to  _drum_ and  _yowl,_  and she feels like she is being scorched from fingertip to elbow, shoulder to rib. And she is  _glowing_  – literally – illuminated from within. 

“ _Stop_.”

The sound in her ears is ringing like nothing she has ever heard – it’s a cacophonous symphony of sonorous rumbles and shrill, metal screeches – and all goes still.

She watches with wide eyes as a wisp, pale silver blooming into a brilliant sapphire, curls from the palm of her hand. Shimmering blues spiral up and in and in until, in a rush, it all billows down and out like a fall cascading against rocks – and there, cradled in her hold, is his heart,  _beating_ ,  _beating_.

Emma barely has time for a sharp inhale before the golden light radiating in streams around her bursts outward and the whole scene is thrown headfirst into pandemonium.

Zelena is propelled back, an indignant pile of green skin and bared teeth, wicked and primitive. Stumbling to his feet from where her energy knocked him over (flattened everyone with a groaning lurch of ground), David trains a gun on her, while Robin doesn’t hesitate to launch an arrow at her throat. The arrow, of course, never connects with its target, and the witch is gone in a flurry of emerald smoke.

“Hook!” she stumbles forward, heart clutched in shaking hands. She presses against his chest, desperate strokes over the still ( _too still_ ) skin there.

“Ah, there it is, Swan,” he gives her a lop-sided grin, but it is remote and flat. “I’ve been looking for that.”

She studies his heart for a moment, ruby red and hardly any black – faint, onyx streaks occasionally brushing the surface the only evidence of three hundred years of piracy and revenge. Lining it up against his breastbone, she hesitates, breathes deep.

“I don’t,” she shakes her head, fights the ache in her throat. “ _Killian_.”

He lifts his right hand to hers and pushes. He grits against the pressure, and Emma doesn’t take her eyes from his as his heart slips back into place with a burning outline against his flesh.

And it’s like someone has poured the life and love and  _soul_  back into him; she’s never noticed the way he delicately charts each curve of her face, or the soft way he gazes into her, like he’s woken to a calm sea and a golden sun – like he’s seen an extraordinary sight. 

“Hello, Swan,” he rubs his thumb against her palm, still resting at the place his heart was outside his body moments ago (where it now thumps a staccato rhythm against their joined hands). “Didn’t mean to worry you.”

She uses her other hand to push back the dark locks stuck to his forehead, and attempts a smile around the quivering of her cheeks. 

She tries to think of words that mean  _you almost died_ and  _I was lost_ and  _don’t leave me, god, don’t leave me_  – that mean seas and suns and marvels, but they’re still tangled somewhere deep, struggling to the surface (alive and real).

She hopes desperately that her eyes tell the same tales as his.

But, to be safe, she leans down and touches her lips to his, lifts their hands and leans down, touches her lips to his heart.

“Just don’t do it again, okay?”


End file.
